Cosmetic box with wheels in water
片輪車蒔絵螺鈿手箱
Artwork · Anonymous · 12th century · box · Tokyo National Museum
A cosmetic box with a hempen core under layers of black lacquer, decorated in maki-e — gold powder sprinkled onto the damp lacquer — and with inlaid mother-of-pearl (raden). Its motif, half-submerged wooden cartwheels left to soak in a stream so that they would not dry out and crack, is purely Japanese in concept and drawn from poetic imagery. 1 Mason 2005, p. 106, fig. 130. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.